NVIDIA to stop making chipsets?

At a recent meeting with its motherboard partners, NVIDIA asked for a show of interest in continuing to make chipsets.

Apparently you could practically hear a pin drop, as no interest was shown; even worse, supposedly some motherboard manufacturers have cancelled upcoming high end projects based on nForce 7 series chipsets.

Frankly, this is hardly surprising, if true.

Intel has always wanted to license SLI for its chipset, and only reluctantly has NVIDIA recently licensed it for x58, but only with the proviso that an nForce 200 chip must be present on the motherboard - an artificial restriction, obviously meant to pump the $30/nF200 chip tax into NVIDIA's pockets, something that motherboard vendors, Intel and users will hardly appreciate.

Mind you, Intel is also at fault - they apparently refused to license their new high-speed interconnect for Nehalem to NVIDIA, thus locking it out of the upcoming lucrative high end market. They are also hell-bent on capturing a large chunk of the GPU market with IGP and Larrabee, putting the squeeze on NVIDIA.

AMD has recently released some excellent chipsets, putting further pressure on Nvidia, and frankly AMD would prefer if AMD cpu/chipset customers would purchase AMD/ATI GPU's.

At this point NVIDIA has some tough choices to make.

The first, most obvious, is to stop artificially crippling SLI drivers, and letting SLI run on ANY chipset, Intel, ATI or martian, and concentrate on their core business - high performance GPU's, this time, for all platforms. Nvidia may have no choice but to do this, even though it will kill its hopes of selling platform solutions for Intel and AMD - but that ship has sailed.

The second, more risky, is to take the bull by the horns, and develop - or license - an x86 compatible processor, and make its own platform. VIA is also feeling the squeeze, and a merged Nvidia / VIA has the potential to be a third major player, and by applying some of their GPU skills, I have little doubt NVIDIA could help VIA engineers make some awesome multi-core x86 silicon.

Personally, I am hoping that Nvidia will adopt *both* choices above, and use the money made selling high-end GPU solutions in a platform agnostic manner to purchase VIA and become a third x86 powerhouse.

UPDATE

We've received an e-mail from NVIDIA.

"We have no plans to leave the chipset business. Feel free to post our response as need…" Brian Burke

Here is their response:

The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business.

In fact, our MCP business is as strong as it ever has been for both AMD and Intel platforms:

a. Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08 was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.

b. SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.

c. nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI. In fact, a recent article on Tom’s Hardware recently came to the same conclusion: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/NVIDIA-790i-SLI,1977-29.html

We're looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms.

Brian Burke

I guess they really did not like that rumour... I'm glad to hear they are staying in the game!